


oh i know the woods (are lovely, dark and deep)

by Crazyamoeba



Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Fantasy AU, Historical AU, M/M, Mythical Beings & Creatures, mentions of human sacrifice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-30
Updated: 2018-09-30
Packaged: 2019-07-20 22:10:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16146566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crazyamoeba/pseuds/Crazyamoeba
Summary: There are things that live in the forest, Staci’s mother had always told him when she had lived. They protect the people that live on their land, in their own strange way.But they don't do it for free.





	oh i know the woods (are lovely, dark and deep)

**Author's Note:**

> So this is essentially just....some nonsense stuff that I was talking to Emily (devils_trap) about, and as always much love and credit to her, as she not only puts up with me sending this stuff to her, but she encourages it. She contributed to this work with some of Staci's inner thoughts, so give her love!
> 
> Apologies if this is a little rough, it's just been yanked directly from a chat.

 

 

There are things that live in the forest, Staci’s mother had always told him when she had lived. Things of legend; huge, hulking shapes with horns and claws - silent, slipping through the trees like shadows hanging on dust - you never see them, but they always see you.

They see all, his mother had said, and they have always protected the people that live on their land, in their own strange way.

But they don't do it for free, and the village had stopped holding up their end of the bargain years ago, and now the Seer and the elders are rustling with unease, like leaves before the winter drop, insisting that they are paying for their hubris, and that they must make amends.

They need to give up something of worth to them, otherwise it won't mean anything

They can’t choose anything too valuable because they are greedy and brash at heart.  
  
They choose grumpy, defensive, sour Staci Pratt, because he's an _omega_ , something that no village really wants to lose because it means one less breeding opportunity, but Staci....his mother died before he was even grown, and his father wanted no part of him after he presented.

He's not soft and simpering like an omega should be; he arches his back and hisses and spits when anyone comes near or even tries to touch him, and all the alphas in the village have come to the conclusion that he's far too much trouble to try to woo into accepting a mounting.  
  
But he's still an omega, and a pretty one at that, so the Creatures should be pleased

They don’t even wait for another day to break before they take him, and why would they? Crops are failing and livestock are dying _now,_ and those who would otherwise have sported friendly faces have hidden them behind the fearful that if it’s not Staci, then who would be sent for?

They take him to the now-disused and crumbling dias built by the ones that had come before them, and it takes two alphas to get him there, kicking and biting and clawing, but they heft him up onto the stone and secure his limbs there, leaving him with two torches to light the Creatures’ way.  
They head off into the darkness, their own torches flickering and disappearing into the darkness, pretending that they can't hear his enraged howls start to bleed into panicked, quickened breaths, slipping out on a whine  
  
“I'll let you! Please, please come back. I'll let you all, i'll be good, please.”  
  
Vision obscured behind the hanging wall of his damp, sweaty curls. How many times has he hidden behind his own little veil, denying eye contact from others, and _all_ contact from alphas? What good has it done him? Left bound to an altar for those that go bump in the night, that water the soil with blood and tears.  
  
He should've - god, he should've taken a husband, should've cleared his thoughts and shelved his petty, wounded pride, because now his hubris will take his life.

Sobbing but trying not to, trying to even out his breathing and shake the blurriness from his eyes, because that's not going to help him now.

Immediately feeling that ache in his chest renew, because nothing is going to help him now, that's pretty obvious. It's not like the fairytales his mother had read to him as a child; the ones that he had suffered an aching neck for, as he had sat at her feet for hour upon hour, gazing raptly up at her now vague and formless face, uncaring that his bones ached from sitting still, as if bound by her words.

Those had nearly always had a happy ending, even if there had been a sting in the tail. But now, Staci doubts that he would even see the tail, barbed and dripping with poison, when it wraps around his throat.

He's bound, not by his mother’s tales, but to an altar, ropes tight and night growing colder, knots tightening with every motion he makes. There is no salvation for him here, no heroic rescue or cunning plan at the last moment.  
  
So he lets himself cry, as if there was anything he could have done to stem the flow anyway. Lets himself cry and even indulges himself in screaming his utter rage and pointless, helpless sadness into the air.

He had always wanted to promise that his last moments on this side of the veil would be spent fighting, no matter how futile. Raging and railing against the injustice of it all, but the truth is that he is alone, cold and scared.  
  
Despite everything, he had been holding out hope that his life would find meaning, purpose. That he would find happiness.

The certainty that that will now not happen is something that cannot be fought against, which wells up in his chest and his throat like water on the lungs, and he cries openly, hoping spitefully, dizzily, that his distress makes his taste bitter and foul to the Creatures, damns the whole fucking village.  
  
“Do you think....you could not be so inconsolable? It's just that we're trying to hunt, and you've scared off all of the animals.”  
  
Breath catching in his throat, held taut as if by the smooth, human hands that rest on the altar. Fingers rounded only with blunt nails, not so very different from staci's own, if a little larger.  
  
He doesn't know how the man came to be sitting, perched happily on his altar in the space that Staci's splayed, bound hands and feet make, because he hadn't felt or heard or smelt a goddamn thing.  
  
“Don't be sad. You're far too pretty to be sad.”  
  
The hand moves towards his face, passes through the shadows with stretching fingertips, and as the moon and torchlight melt away under the shelter of the trees above, as the man's hands trail through the darkness proper, Staci's eyes roll and widen with renewed pangs of terror.

As the lack of light rolls off and through the man's fingers like smoke, the shadows playing there seem to be sliced apart by the flickering impression of long, curved claws, and it's like they release whatever hold they had inside his throat, because Staci can't help the sodden, choked-off whimpers that form on his lips.  
  
The man pets his forehead once, soft and warm and human once again, before whipping it back with throaty laughter as Staci's chattering teeth attempt to still themselves in the fleshy part of his palm.  
  
“Oh my sweet, wild little _beast_ , they did well when they brought you.”

He graces Staci with a beaming, horrifyingly normal smile - wide and charming and so much like the ones that the alphas in the village had used to bestow on him when the traces of his heat still lingered around his scent, and Staci wants to close his eyes and magic it all away, because this one seems more fucking _genuinely delighted_ than any of the civilised smirks he had ever received behind the village walls.

The smile flickers and drops into a disappointed and bizarrely, distressingly overdone moue of consternation, but at least it means that the lips cover all those bone-white teeth and Staci can stop trying to count them, can shelve away his lurking, roiling suspicion that there might just be too many in there.

“Kind of insulted for both of us though, clearly they didn't know what to do with you.”  
  
He cocks his head curiously at Staci, and the one side of it that dips into the darkness proper gives Staci a quick glimpse of sharp, curling horns spiraling from soft, dark hair, before they disappear just as quickly as they came.  
  
“Frankly, I'm not quite sure what to do with you either. But don't worry, I know someone who will.”  
  
Tipping his head over his shoulder, keeping those too-bright eyes fixed on Staci as he calls through the forest, the sound ringing and loud, like the air is shivering to get away from it.  
  
“Jacob! Jacob, come find me. I've got a present for you!”

Staci's body flinches away from the voice bouncing damningly clear through the forest, which seems to deaden in its wake. Wants to beg the creature to be quiet, for surely this is no man, nothing of merely flesh and blood. Wants to plead with him to reign in his voice, to keep Staci's presence and his fear to himself, to stop that _sound_ .  
  
The sound which is soft and maddening and growing louder and louder, striking something within his chest that reverberates terribly, chasing up and down his spine in time with some horrifying beat that he can't quite make out, only knows that it's coming closer and closer and -  
  
\- and it's the trees. The leaves. They rustle in the otherwise still air, the movement creeping from the heart of the forest and radiating out as if the very branches themselves are trying to escape from some Thing that walks among them.

The rustling and restlessness reaches the line of trees that make up the wall of the clearing that Staci and his unwanted companion find themselves in, and the terror seizes his heart, his throat, squeezing everything soft and vulnerable and vital until he can't even breathe to beg his newfound tormentor to _please, please stop_ .  
  
“John.”  
  
He swears he feels a little shameful warmth trickle down his thighs, although it’s the only movement his body seems capable of allowing as he stares in frozen, rigor mortis terror at the hulking Thing that slides out of the shadows as though they were a part of his very fabric.  
  
  
“Jacob!” The lithe, too-bright thing still sitting at Staci's side exclaims, opening his arms wide enough that Staci gets another split-second flash of claws. “Look what i have for you! Isn't he pretty?”

  
The Thing's head turns, dispelling more darkness, sending it fluttering off into the treeline like moths, and all that Staci can think, the only thought that chimes in his otherwise empty, echoing head is that _god all the fucking stories are true._  
  
He's huge, not just tall, towering above any alpha that Staci's ever met, but he's broad and solid and so much mass, like a great elk with wide chest and - god, Staci thinks his skin might be trying to shiver right off his bones - the sharp, tapered tines rising out of the violent flames rising in hair-like strands from his head.  
  
“He's not yours, John. Put him back.”

The smaller companion - fucking _John_ apparently, of all things for a nightmare to be named - cants his head and opens his mouth in pure indignation - and god Staci really wishes he would _close it_ because there are _definitely_ teeth that are too numerous and too sharp for this to be anything other than a fever-dream and god, he would do anything to wake up on the floor of his hut and have another chance to bend his neck and grovel to alpha Burke.  
  
“I didn't even take him!”  
  
The larger creature snorts, loud and hot and distinctly unhappy, the gust travelling over Staci's shivering body and doing nothing to disperse the chills wracking it.  
  
“ _J_ _ohn_. Take him back.”  
  
The growl is so low that Staci registers it thrumming through his hollow-feeling bones. This creature's mere _voice_ could snap his every tendon and his strongest bone, it feels like he's falling apart under the scrutiny, and his body aches from keeping itself so contained, but it's telling Staci that perhaps if they stay very still and quiet, the creature will lose interest.  
  
“Jacob.”  John's voice dips from its silvery, playful air, drops into tail-twitch annoyance. “I didn't take him. _They_ left him for us. Smell him if you don't believe me. He reeks of the village.”  


Jacob's eyes - piercing, unnatural blue like John's, only they feel like ice fire burning Staci's skin  - rest heavily on John for a moment. Jaw clenched, brow low like he's testing the weight of his fellow nightmare's soul in his hands - though Staci sincerely doubts that either of them have any souls in their possession that they didn't devour.  
  
Seemingly satisfied - though still far from happy - with what he finds, he lowers that great head and their lethal, glinting tines smoothly down to Staci's level. Doesn't even make eye contact, which Staci is unendingly grateful for because the proximity of those flashing eyes and flaring nostrils is enough to make his bladder weaken once again.  
  
Jacob moves his head swiftly up Staci's body, dragging the slightly skin-warmed air blanketing Staci's body slowly into his nostrils before releasing and repeating again.  
  
Staci chokes a small sound back down into the cavernous ruins of his chest, hunching his neck with its paper-thin skin and fluttering pulse down into his shoulders. Trembling and squirming as Jacob lingers by the thing he seeks to protect, his breath whuffling by Staci's ear like the hot, sharp-toothed panting of a hungry wolf.

Jerks his head up so suddenly and with such a disgruntled rumbling sound that Staci almost opens his mouth and does something stupid like beg.

“Well?”

That wide smile is tripping across John’s face like it never left, bright and flickering like sunlight dancing across water. Skimming across the muscles there and pulling them loosely, still with the vague traces of human charm there, but this time the tides part to reveal far too many of those numerous teeth, and they are suddenly nothing like the alpha lips that he could never bring himself to kiss even in the exhaustion of a heat spent alone.

“He’s ours, right?” His whole body is bouncing, shaking with excitement on the icy, rough stone of Staci’s altar, in stark counterpoint to the tense, furiously still lines of Jacob’s body.

When he speaks, Staci’s fingernails - soft and easily-torn and _helpless_ against the gifts that the shadows have seen fit to bestow on his newfound companions - dig small crescent moons into the palm of his hands, perhaps hoping to prepare and acclimatise him in any small way to the entertainments the creatures will make of him.

“Yes. Run ahead, tell Joseph to prepare for one more mouth to feed.”

Almost spat through gritted teeth, and Staci can’t help the sick, stuttering groan that leaves his mouth as he fights to spit out words of his own, a hundred different variations of which flit across his mind as Jacob’s slow, startlingly blue eyes fix directly on his own for the first time.

They are considering, speculative like the anticipation trembling through the air before a cat pounces and extends its claws, and Staci really wishes that they would go back to staring hard at John.

John whose departure Staci hadn’t even registered, although somewhere in the small and very vacant space of his mind, Staci thinks that he can hear wild, joyful whooping and howling ring through the trees like rusted, jagged church bells.

“Don’t be afraid.” Jacob’s eyes are averted this time, as if he had known and heard Staci’s prayer to the any who might have forgotten him. “You’re a gift. There would be no point or honour in defacing something given freely to us.”

Not pausing to indulge Staci’s flinch as Jacob’s fingers burrow under the roughened, frayed rope binding him to the stone, but never so much as glancing Staci’s skin with the sharpened, crescent claws that bleed from his fingertips like smoke.

“We are going Home, that is all. You have no place left for you behind village walls. We will give you purpose.”


End file.
